Excerpt from The Last Boy and Girl in the World by Siobhan Vivian, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Because like I said before, I had only kissed two boys in my lifetime. Neither one was from Aberdeen. They were both friends of boys that Elise and Morgan were interested in.

We'd get dressed up cute and make the drive to Hillsdale, or some other town, to meet them. At first, it was more Elise's thing, but then boys started asking Morgan for her number.

Over the past year, I lost count of how many times Morgan or Elise would stand off a little ways with the boys they liked, whispering to them or showing them something on their phones, leaving me with whoever else had tagged along. Unlike my friends, I never knew how to act. I'd either completely clam up, afraid I'd say something dumb, or I'd swing too far the other way and say, like, many many many dumb things.

In the last three years, I'd met lots of boys, obviously. But I'd only ever kissed two.

By the time Morgan dropped me off, it had started to rain yet again. Lightly, but the way the wind whipped through the trees, it was clearly the beginning of another big storm. The weathermen were right after all.

Mom's car was long gone. I knew she'd be working. The only patch of driveway that wasn't getting slick was underneath Dad's old work truck. It sat in our driveway like a clunker because Dad didn't drive anymore, but it still ran fine. We'd been trying to sell it forever but there were no takers. Mom said Dad was asking too much. Dad defended his price by listing off the truck's attributes—how dependable it was, the low mileage, how he'd splurged on new brakes right before his accident.

Before I went in the house, I climbed inside it and started it up, letting the engine run for a few minutes as I looked at Jesse's text again. I did it to make sure that the battery wouldn't die. I was hoping it wouldn't sell and then I'd get to drive it when I turned seventeen next March.

I jogged the path to our house, a clapboard cottage with shingles the color of buttercream and the front door painted robin's-egg blue. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor, a living room, dining room, and kitchen on the first floor, plus a small attic with a pull-down ladder and a musty root cellar, which had always scared the crap out of me. We had a front porch just big enough for a swing, and the moss-covered roof came out from directly under my bedroom window.

I crept inside, knowing Dad would be sleeping.

Dad had become nocturnal ever since his accident. He'd spend every night on his computer, and then sleep pretty much the whole day away. It was easier for him, I think, to be asleep while everyone else in town was out doing the things he couldn't anymore. So I wasn't surprised to find his computer on. He used two chairs, one to sit in and one with a couch pillow on it where he could prop up his leg. I cleared away a coffee cup and a dirty plate, turned off the monitor, pushed the chairs back in, picked up his cane, and set it next to the stairs so it would be waiting for him when he woke up and came down again.

I went into the kitchen and made myself a grilled cheese. My sandwich in one hand and my phone in the other, I reread Jesse's text a few more times before I forced myself to delete it.

It wasn't even hard, because I was 99 percent sure I'd never hear from Jesse again. I didn't even blame Wes for making me think so pessimistically. It was just my reality, to never have a boy be interested in me romantically for more than one random moment. Like a TV show you don't like but you end up watching anyway, because there's nothing else on.

And remember, this was Jesse Ford. Not some less-cute friend of the boys Elise and Morgan were interested in. Jesse could get any girl in school he wanted. He was so charming and funny and disarming that it didn't matter if he wasn't the most traditionally handsome guy. It didn't even matter if the girl he was after had a boyfriend. The year before, some meathead football player found out that his cheerleader girlfriend had secretly kissed Jesse, and he punched Jesse square in the jaw in the middle of the cafeteria. The picture of the aftermath, Jesse proudly grinning with a bloody lip and a purple cheek, was still his profile picture.

Excerpted from The Last Boy and Girl in the World by Siobhan Vivian. Copyright © 2016 by Siobhan Vivian. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.